


After Tokyo: Kostya

by winteryserpent (silencedancer)



Category: The Secret World
Genre: Anxiety, Character motivation, Drug Use, Gen, Insomnia, nihilistic bullshit
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-08
Updated: 2017-11-08
Packaged: 2019-01-30 22:50:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 589
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12663057
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/silencedancer/pseuds/winteryserpent
Summary: Illuminati Bee, Kostya Starikov, is unable to sleep after the events of Tokyo and his experience at Orochi Tower.





	After Tokyo: Kostya

Difficulty sleeping was not new to Kostya; it plagued him even before he had swallowed a bee. Ironically, in the past it was the fear that he had swallowed a bee, wasp, or some kind of stinging insect that would keep him awake sometimes, convinced that the strange tingling feeling in his throat was a writhing, living thing that somehow got inside him when he ate the wrong thing. He would be unable to sleep, feeling it there, forcing himself to cough to dislodge whatever it was or drinking something to force it down, worrying the whole time. Sometimes he wondered if this had always been a premonition of what would come in the future, but at least now the presence of his bee has lessened the effects of his insomnia.

Yet he still needed some sleep even if the insomnia was worse now after Tokyo. As he stares at the ceiling most nights, he sometimes thinks he hears John, whispering to him, cutting through the distant sound of buzzing, the constant tinnitus he’s learned to tune out. John is harder to ignore.

Kostya knows he’s been infected by the dreamers, having accepted their gifts and pledged his loyalty, only the bee inside him keeping from being entirely taken over. He let them in, not entirely intending to, but he had to live with his decisions. His wings show the truth to anyone who sees them, but he finds that he doesn’t care half the time. As for the other half, well, he’s gotten very good at telling himself that there’s a way to fix it.

(Even if he knows deep down that that’s not true.)

The Illuminati drugs help too. The bees usually doesn’t like it, but the bees ruined his life in the first place anyways and he needed the numbness. His parents told him never to dabble in the occult; look at what it did to Uncle Boris, always drinking vodka to forget about the things he had seen. 

But it was the occult that grabbed him instead anyway and there’s now radio static in his ears and a strong urge to punch a disembodied voice, crackling like an old car radio switching stations. Fuck Tokyo, fuck John – if that’s even his real name. He ignores the part of him that is intrigued by John, freed from all constraints of humanity, but he is determined to still play at being human, even though he’s really a monster, deconstructed and reconstructed so many times he doesn’t know what he is anymore, the taste of sticky honey in his mouth each time. 

Sometimes when he was drunk or drugged up enough, he could admit to himself that he might be attracted to John. It was that same urge that let in the dreamers and stained those wings of his, that urge for anarchy, to disobey, to fight against the bee, that late night anxiety come true. Something always pulled him to the void—a pessimistic, nihilist perspective so to say. 

His odd choice of a philosophy minor is helping him more than what he majored in. Funny how things work out.

He wished he could sleep as he continued to stare at the ceiling with those staticky whispers crooning into his ears and wondered if it was even possible for him to die now. Maybe the only way out now was to be consumed by the void and he didn’t even know if that would be truly an escape or just an entrance into an even worse hell.


End file.
